Electro-Optical (EO) modulators are an important building block in optical communication systems, optical sensors and other applications. Some EO modulators are based on microring configurations, and various microring modulators are known in the art.
Microring modulators are described, for example, by Xu et al., in “Micrometer-Scale Silicon Electro-Optic Modulator,” Nature, volume 435, no. 7040, May, 2005, pages 325-327; by Lipson, in “Compact Electro-Optic Modulators on a Silicon Chip,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, volume 12, no. 6, December, 2006, pages 1520-1526; by Li et al., in “Coupled-Ring-Resonator-Based Silicon Modulator for Enhanced Performance,” Optics Express, volume 16, no. 17, August, 2008, pages 13342-13348; and by Popović, in “Resonant Optical Modulators Beyond Conventional Energy-Efficiency and Modulation frequency Limitations,” IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, volume 14, no. 4, April, 2012, pages 483-485, which are all incorporated herein by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,483,521, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes techniques for cavity dynamics compensation in resonant optical modulators. In some disclosed embodiments, a resonant optical modulator includes an optical resonator, a first port optically coupled to the optical resonator with a first time-variable coupling rate, a second port optically coupled to the optical resonator with a second time-variable coupling rate, and a driver for simultaneously modulating the first and second time-variable coupling rates such that a photon population in the optical resonator is substantially constant.